Happy Thursday, friend! Welcome to an interview with author Hollay Ghadery about her short stories collection, Widow Fantasies. I am excited to dive into these stories. Let’s chat with Hollay and learn more.
Get to know the author: Hollay Ghadery
Welcome Hollay! Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!
I am an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre author who is also the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. I have four kids, three goats, five chickens, two dogs, and a spouse wandering about somewhere. While I write nonfiction, fiction, as well as kids books, I think I’ll always consider myself a poet first. Well, actually, a reader first. Always a reader first.
What inspired you to write this book?
After around eight years of marriage, I started to have fantasies about planning my husband’s funeral. I wasn’t fantasizing about killing him: just planning his funeral. Living a life without him. I felt freer in these fantasies, but guilty. This is a person I loved, who loved me. How deranged was I? I spoke to a therapist and it turns out these sorts of fantasies aren’t that uncommon, especially for women in relationships where they do the brunt of childrearing and housework, often in addition to their own jobs outside the house. Over the next few years, I did a lot of thinking about and research on the nature of fantasies, and how they are a useful and often subversive outlet to act out desires safely. They can also point to things that are missing in our lives; and these things aren’t always the obvious things either. I didn’t actually want to have to plan my husband’s funeral. But I did want him to start helping out more without my having to supervise him through every step. I longed for a true partnership, not someone else I had to guide through life. I had kids for that. We have now been married almost 16 years so I think it’s safe to say my fantasies served their purpose, which was to allow me room to breathe until I worked out how to talk to my husband about what I needed.
How long did it take you to write this book, from the first idea to the last edit?
One of the stories in the book is over 10 years old, but this story was a standalone story that I repurposed for the collection after I’d written it, which took about a year. It’s not a big book.
What makes your book unique?
The majority of these stories are flash fiction or short stories that are on the shorter side. The reason for this is that when I was writing the stories, my children were all still very young and I didn’t have time to develop in depth plot lines and narrative arcs. The same went for the time I was able to fantasize: I didn’t have time to entertain long flights of fancy, but could day dream while washing dishes or vacuuming or folding laundry. So the form of the stories reflects the themes of the collection.
Did you bring any of your experiences into this book?
Yes, definitely. There are some stories that are almost auto-biographic (like the one where am woman has part of her tongue removed because she’s convinced a lump that’s been there her whole life has turned into something sinister), and there are ones that simply draw on a small part of my life (like the story that features a Kubota tractor, which is a tractor my grandfather had that I loved.) There are also stories that are based on feelings I’ve had (like the story about a mother fantasizing about doing physical harm to a child who has hurt her child). At the very least, there’s a nugget of my life in each story.
Where can readers find you on the Internet?
Instagram: @hollayghadery
TikTok: @hollayghadery
Facebook: @hollayghaderywriter
Twitter: @Hollay2
Widow Fantasies
Fiction, 2024
Fantasies are places we briefly visit; we can’t live there. The stories in Widow Fantasies deftly explore the subjugation of women through the often subversive act of fantasizing. From a variety of perspectives, through a symphony of voices, Widow Fantasies immerses the reader in the domestic rural gothic, offering up unforgettable stories from the shadowed lives of girls and women.
“Widow Fantasies is an astounding collection of short stories from poet, Hollay Ghadery. With unflinching fierce and tender honesty, Ghadery captures private, intimate moments in the lives of her characters. The wit, range and cheeky defiance in these stories will leave you breathless. Her writing does that rare thing we want art to do for us: sparkle, astound and pack a punch. This is a collection to sit with and savour.” — Salma Hussain, author of The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan
“Widow Fantasies offers an astonishing visceral experience: a sucker-punch and a kick to the gut. It is a mesmerizing glimpse into the stories we can’t bear to share. What Ghadery does so beautifully in this tightly woven collection is illustrate the ways we make sense of our shame and the complicity of the decisions we make to try and avoid it. A stunning collection by a talented writer .” — Minelle Mahtani, author of May It Have a Happy Ending
Content notes include eating disorders, miscarriage, suicide.
Book Excerpt from
Widow Fantasies
Jaws (The Full Story)
What if the other fish don’t like her? That was my first thought, and it’s not as silly as it sounds. One never stops being a mother and Jaws was too sweet for her own good. Always had been. Originally, Jaws was one of two goldfish we brought home from the Nowruz bazaar seven years ago and the other fish—a nasty, mottled thing of white and black—had pecked and picked on Jaws mercilessly. But we found the bully floating wide-eyed and belly up before the final new year celebration on Sizdah Bedar.
Thanks to God.
My second thought was that I would never speak to Reza again. Son of a dog, I told him I liked her in the house with me. But I leave for a day to get Keyvan settled in his dorm and he dumps Jaws in our pond.
What kind of life was that for a fish? Reza stabbed his finger toward the pond, spit flying from his mouth. Stuck in a tank in a house with you all day?
Goldfish aren’t as stupid as people.
Or as people think.
By our second year together, Jaws would eat her flakes right from my fingers. She’d respond to her dinner bell, bobbing excitedly when I rang it at meal times.
Whenever I walked by her tank, she’d swim out from behind the screen of her silk plants and follow me back and forth as I dusted and vacuumed and folded laundry. I tried to show Reza how incredible it was—she knew my face—but he only complained the tank was beginning to stink and didn’t I have anything better to do with my time? We should have had more children, he’d say.
Keyvan used to be amazed by her tricks until he wasn’t.
She doesn’t know you, Mama jan. She probably can’t even see you. You’re just a blob or shadow or something.
When Reza’s mistress died last year, Jaws was the only one I let see me cry. She understood: it was my loss as much as his. The woman had been oxygen to our little bowl of stagnant water. She’d given me room to breathe.
Now light from shattered glass ricochets skyward from the driveway. A few minutes after I’d heaved the empty tank at Reza’s head, I heard the pop of gravel under his tires as he shot out onto the road. Good riddance to him. I was sorry about the tank though. I hadn’t been thinking.
I lower myself to the grass beside the pond. The cherry blossom tree is alive with bees and soft pink petals freckle the water’s surface. Jaws must be hidden somewhere in the weeds. I see a few of the black moors, the flash of a white and yellow fish, but no sign of Jaws’ telltale Tiger Lily scales. Tuba, a fern green, three-legged frog named by Keyvan when he was younger, sits like a mound of melting butter on a lily pad. He croaks a sonic, deep belch.
Do frogs eat goldfish?
There are at least half a dozen other fish in our decorative pond but other than plugging in the de-icer every winter, I’ve never thought much about them. They were here when we bought the property and existed fine without my intervention. Even when a green heron began hunting around the water, baiting its surface with twigs and insects, I hadn’t worried. I stood at the living room window and watched, describing the scene to Jaws and she stared at me with her unblinking copper eyes and agreed: life was much better inside.
I put my hand in the pond water and splashed a little. “Mahi koochik? Are you there?”
Tuba belches again and leaps into the water.
I splash some more, stirring up algae so the pond’s surface becomes opaque.
I think of all the time I spent by the pond with Keyvan when he was a child, watching larvae and tadpoles grow. How did I never think to check if the frogs were eating the goldfish?
I get up and run. Bursting into the house, I find the dinner bell where I left it: on the table where her tank used to be. I’m ringing the bell before I’m even back out the door.
“Mahi, bia! Come!”
I continue to ring desperately until two unmistakable orange nares poke through the scum. I scoop her into overflowing palmfuls of water and we greet each other, gasping.
Interested?
Find Widow Fantasies on Goodreads and Amazon.
Thanks for taking the time to join us for this interview!
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